Saint Damien of Molokai (1840–1889)

Birth in Tremelo (3 January 1840)

Jozef De Veuster was born on 3 January 1840 in Tremelo, a large farming village in Flemish Brabant, to a family of farmers and grain merchants.^[10][11] He was the seventh of eight children of Frans De Veuster and Anne-Catherine Wouters, in a deeply Christian home: two of his sisters became religious sisters, and his elder brother Auguste also entered religious life under the name Father Pamphile.^[12]

Strong, energetic, and not naturally inclined toward study, young “Jef” left school at thirteen to work on the farm, then attended a college in Braine-le-Comte to learn French and prepare for a career in business.^[13] It was there, during a mission preached by Redemptorists in 1858, that his vocation matured: he wanted to consecrate his life to God and, above all, to leave as a missionary for the ends of the earth.

Entering the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts

In 1859, Jozef joined his brother in Leuven in the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary—the Picpus Fathers, devoted to Eucharistic adoration and overseas missions.^[14][15] There he received the name Damien, in memory of the fourth-century physician and martyr. Although his superiors initially doubted that a postulant with so little education could manage the studies, his brother taught him Latin, and Damien professed his vows on 7 October 1860.^[16][17]

One devotion already summed up his entire soul: throughout his years of formation, he prayed every day before an image of Saint Francis Xavier, patron saint of missionaries, asking to be sent far away.^[18] Heaven would answer that prayer in an unexpected way.

Taking His Brother's Place

In 1863, the congregation selected a group of missionaries for the Apostolic Vicariate of the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). Father Pamphile, already a priest, was to be among them—but he fell gravely ill with typhus and could not sail.^[19] Damien, still merely a professed religious and not yet ordained, wrote directly to the superior general offering to take his brother's place. His request was accepted.

The Picpus tradition reports the feeling that filled him as he embarked: God — whom he had prayed, through the intercession of Saint Francis Xavier, patron of missionaries, to obtain a distant mission for him — had answered his prayer beyond his expectations. These words were handed down indirectly, and their exact formulation is not established in the accessible sources.^[20]

On 23 October 1863, aged twenty-three, Damien left Flanders; after a long voyage, he arrived in Honolulu on 19 March 1864.^[21][22]

Honolulu and Ordination (1864)

A few weeks after his arrival, Damien was ordained a priest on 21 May 1864 in the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in Honolulu by Bishop Louis Maigret, the apostolic vicar.^[23][24] He was twenty-four and aflame with zeal for an island kingdom then being decimated by imported epidemics—smallpox, cholera, influenza, syphilis, and above all leprosy—which struck the Native Hawaiian population with terrible force.

His First Missions in Hawaii (1865–1873)

Beginning in 1865, the young priest was first assigned to the vast missions of Puna and then Kohala, on the island of Hawaii.^[25] For eight years, he traveled on horseback across immense rural parishes, built chapels with his own hands, learned the Hawaiian language, baptized, and taught the faith. He proved an untiring and practical missionary, as much mason and carpenter as man of prayer—a temperament that, unbeknownst to him, was preparing him for his life's work.

Leprosy in the Kingdom of Hawaii

First appearing in the archipelago around the 1830s and 1840s—and then attributed to workers from China—leprosy (now called Hansen's disease) spread among Hawaiians, whose immune systems were unaccustomed to it.^[26] Disfiguring, long incurable, and surrounded by biblical terror, the disease inspired panic.

The Segregation Law of 1865

To curb contagion, King Kamehameha V and the legislature enacted an “Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy” in 1865.^[27] Those in the advanced stages of the disease were torn from their families and deported to the Kalaupapa peninsula on the north side of the island of Molokai: a strip of land cut off from the rest of the island by a wall of cliffs hundreds of meters high, a natural prison from which no one could escape. From 1866 to 1969, approximately eight thousand people would be sent there.

Kalawao Before Damien

Officially, the Royal Board of Health sent food and supplies to Kalawao. But without staff or care, the settlement sank into despair. With no future before them, many of the exiles gave themselves over to alcohol and debauchery under the grim motto reported at the time: “Here there is no law.”^[28][29] The superintendent of health himself acknowledged the horror of the place:

“As long as the lepers can take care of themselves, they are comparatively comfortable; but as soon as the dreadful disease renders them helpless, it would seem that even demons themselves would pity their condition and hasten their death.” — The superintendent of the Board of Health to Bishop Maigret, quoted verbatim in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1908)^[30]

It was in this human hell that a priest would ask to live.

The Volunteer of 10 May 1873

The apostolic vicar, Bishop Maigret, was seeking a priest for the settlement but did not wish to condemn anyone to an exile that was almost certainly fatal: four missionaries were to take turns. Damien was the first to volunteer. On 10 May 1873, the bishop personally took him to Kalawao and presented him to the settlement's approximately six hundred people with leprosy.^[31][32] Damien immediately decided to stay forever, sleeping his first nights beneath a pandanus tree—the very tree at whose foot he would later be buried.

Building a People: St Philomena Church

Confronted with chaos, Damien understood that souls cannot be saved while bodies are despised. He organized the settlement: he enlarged and beautified the small St Philomena Church, replaced hovels with painted wooden houses, dug reservoirs for drinking water, laid roads, founded schools and an orphanage, and established farms and choirs.^[33][34] In doing so, he restored what disease had stolen from the exiles: order, beauty, and community—a people.

Body and Soul: Physician, Gravedigger, Priest

With no medical training, Damien dressed suppurating wounds every day, treated ulcers, and washed bodies that no one dared touch. He made the coffins with his own hands—more than a thousand—and dug the graves. He founded a “Christian Burial Association” so that each dead person would be accompanied with dignity, with a bell, coffin, and procession; upon his arrival, he had found corpses left unburied.^[35][36] He shared the sick people's table, smoked the same pipe, and sometimes ate with the same hand: not from carelessness, but from refusing any distance between himself and them.

Six months after his arrival, he wrote to his brother Pamphile the sentence that sums up his entire life:

“I make myself a leper with the lepers to gain all to Jesus Christ. That is why, in preaching, I say ‘we lepers,’ not ‘my brethren.’” — Damien de Veuster, letter to his brother Pamphile (1873)^[37]

The Eucharist, His Only Consolation

How could a man endure for years in such a place of death, without leave, almost without visitors, far from his family? Damien himself gave the answer: his strength came from the Eucharist. Faithful to the charism of the Sacred Hearts, he instituted adoration at Kalawao so that the people with leprosy would know that Christ was present among them. He confided his secret to a fellow priest:

To a fellow religious he confided — according to the words handed down by Fr. Roger Landry as taken from a letter of Damien whose exact reference could not be established — that he found his consolation in the one and only companion who would never leave him, the Divine Savior in the Holy Eucharist: without the Blessed Sacrament, a position like his would be unbearable, but with Our Lord at his side, he remained always happy and content.^[38]

These words place Damien within the great tradition of abandonment to the will of God and Eucharistic love, close in spirit to Saint Peter Julian Eymard, his century's apostle of the Eucharist, and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who at the same time was offering her hidden life out of love.

“We Lepers”: Solidarity to the End

His choice to preach using the words “we lepers” was no mere formula: it was theology in action. Damien rejected the stance of a benefactor looking down on those he helped. He wanted to be one of them, sharing their fate, their table, and soon their disease. In this he literally imitated Christ, who “was made sin” and descended to the lowest place to raise humanity up.^[39]

December 1884: He Becomes a Leper

One evening in December 1884, after eleven years in the settlement, Damien put his feet into water he thought was warm but which was actually scalding: he felt no pain. The loss of sensation was the dreaded sign. He had contracted leprosy.^[40] According to tradition, he announced it himself to his congregation the following Sunday, beginning his sermon as always with “we lepers” — but this time with no figure of speech, for the words, which he had spoken since 1873 out of solidarity, had literally become true in his own flesh.^[41]

His Collaborators in the Final Years

Damien's illness moved the world. Reinforcements finally reached Kalaupapa: the Belgian priest Louis-Lambert Conrardy; the American lay brother Joseph Dutton, a Civil War veteran; the nurse James Sinnett; and above all Mother Marianne Cope and her Franciscan Sisters of Syracuse, who took charge of the hospital and orphanage.^[42] The Japanese physician Masanao Goto treated Damien with his therapies; Damien wanted no other doctor. Far from withdrawing, Damien redoubled his efforts in his final years, completing buildings and orphanages.

Death (15 April 1889)

Confined to bed from 23 March 1889 and having made his general confession on 30 March, Damien died peacefully on the morning of Monday 15 April 1889 — Monday of Holy Week, not “Easter Monday” (in 1889, Easter fell on Sunday 21 April)^[43] — aged forty-nine, surrounded by his fellow religious and the people with leprosy.^[44][45] The entire settlement followed his coffin—a coffin like those he had made himself for so many others—to the cemetery, and he was buried beneath the pandanus tree where he had slept on his first night sixteen years earlier.

The Reverend Hyde and Stevenson's Defense

A few months after his death, a Presbyterian minister in Honolulu, the Reverend Charles McEwen Hyde, wrote a private letter—soon published—describing Damien as “a coarse, dirty man” who had contracted leprosy through his own carelessness and misconduct.^[46][47] The slander outraged the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, himself suffering from tuberculosis, who had spent eight days on Molokai and interviewed its residents. He answered with a scathing open letter, printed at his own expense, which became a classic of English literature:

“If that world at all remember you, on the day when Damien of Molokai shall be named a Saint, it will be in virtue of one work: your letter.” — Robert Louis Stevenson, Open Letter to the Reverend Dr Hyde (1890)^[48]

Stevenson portrayed Damien as “a man, with all his weaknesses, essentially heroic, and alive with rugged honesty.”^[49] The writer's prophecy would be fulfilled a century later.

The Return of the Relics

In January 1936, at the request of King Leopold III and the Belgian government, Damien's body was exhumed and returned to Belgium aboard the ship Mercator; he was interred in Leuven, in the crypt of his congregation's chapel.^[50] After the 1995 beatification, as a reciprocal gesture, the relic of his right hand was returned to Hawaii and placed in his original grave on Molokai. The saint thus rests between his two homelands: Flanders, which gave him, and the island, which received him.

The Beatification Miracle (1995)

The cause first recognized the unexplained healing in 1895 of the French nun Sister Simplicia Hue, who suffered from a persistent intestinal disease: her pain and symptoms disappeared overnight after a novena to Father Damien.^[51] On this basis, John Paul II beatified Damien on 4 June 1995 at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Koekelberg (Brussels).

Audrey Toguchi and the Canonization (2009)

The second required miracle was the healing of Audrey Toguchi, a Hawaiian woman diagnosed in 1997 with a liposarcoma that had metastasized to her lungs—considered an incurable cancer. After she prayed at Damien's grave on Molokai, her complete remission remained medically unexplained.^[52][53] On 11 October 2009, Benedict XVI enrolled Damien among the saints in the presence of King Albert II of Belgium. In his homily, the pope summed up the missionary's greatness:

“Not without fear and repugnance, he chose to go to the Island of Molokai to serve the lepers who lived there, abandoned by all. The servant of the Word consequently became a suffering servant, a leper with the lepers, for the last four years of his life.” — Benedict XVI, canonization homily, 11 October 2009^[54]

Patron Saint of People with Leprosy, Outcasts, and Hawaii

The Church has made Damien the patron saint of people with leprosy, the sick, and outcasts, as well as of the Diocese of Honolulu and the State of Hawaii.^[55] His statue is one of the two figures chosen by Hawaii for the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall. His liturgical feast is celebrated on 10 May (and on 15 April, the day of his death, in Hawaii).

“The Greatest Belgian”

Beyond the Church, Damien became a universal icon of heroic charity. In 2005, the Flemish public voted him “De Grootste Belg”—the greatest Belgian of all time—and he also ranked very highly in the equivalent French-speaking poll.^[56] Mother Teresa, Gandhi, and Mahatma have praised his example. Three centuries after the great missionaries of the Enlightenment, Damien reminds the world that holiness is not an idea but a body given up: “making myself a leper with the lepers,” even unto death, so that the most rejected might know that they are “precious in the eyes of God.”^[57][58]

• Saint Peter Julian Eymard (1811–1868) — the nineteenth-century apostle of the Eucharist, whose devotion to the Blessed Sacrament sheds light on Damien's spirituality.
• Saint John Bosco (1815–1888) — Damien's contemporary and another giant of practical charity toward those abandoned in his time.
• Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) — patron saint of missions, who offered in the hidden life of Carmel the life that Damien gave in the open.
• Saint John Vianney (1786–1859) — an image of the priest wholly given to his people, with the same thirst for souls.
• Saint Alphonsus Liguori (1696–1787) — master of popular missions and mercy, heir to the spirituality of the great modern apostles.